Page 79 - FDCC Pandemic Book

Living in a Pandemic: A Collection of Stories on Coping, Resilience & Hope
I donned one hat after another, or simply piled them atop each other when time did not permit a swap. I was front and center, putting the crisis management skills that had been rocket fuel for my career to the test. I was in the flow. In the zone. Navigating the challenges as they arose. Marshalling the resources of our legal team to support our business partners. Encouraging that team to rally and come through for our business, even as we were grappling with the personal impacts of shutdowns, children home from school, and supply shortages.
Yet, in those moments, I was measuring my ability to “handle” it all by whether I was wearing a hat. Yes—you read that correctly. In those tumultuous early days, I was measuring myself not by the work I was doing, the leadership I was demonstrating, or the outcomes I was driving, but by whether I was keeping up appearances. Wearing a hat for Zoom and Teams calls that started at 7am and ended, if I was lucky, by 10pm was somehow my barometer for how well I was handling the challenge. Exhausted, and sick, I was beating myself up over wearing a ball cap in those early, hectic days.
Relief came from a place I least expected—my CEO. In one of our then daily 7:30am COVID response team calls, he took a moment to praise our supply chain team for instituting a practice of wearing hats on Fridays and declared Fridays to be company- wide hat days for however long the pandemic would last. We enthusiastically embraced Hat Fridays. (Who wouldn’t when your CEO was encouraging you to do it and you were spending every Friday morning on a Zoom call with him?) Wearing hats on Friday forged a sense of connection in a time when we were all physically disconnected. The Friday hats created camaraderie and a little space for conversation about something so much lighter than the challenges we faced. For me, Hat Fridays triggered an evolution that became a small revolution.
As an endorsed activity, I took full advantage of Hat Fridays, even endeavoring to plan my Friday calendar to avoid meetings or evening obligations that would not be hat friendly. I looked forward to Hat Fridays—to that extra 15 minutes of sleep or time spent working out before the day started. With that little bit of permission from a leader I revere, my basis for self-criticism became a source of freedom. Before long, I was wearing a hat on other days of the week, and not just ball caps. I was wearing my favorite Panamas, fedoras, and glamorous beach hats—whatever hat suited my mood for the moment. And, nothing bad happened. No one took me less seriously or wrote me off. No one chastised me for looking unprofessional or taking a chance. No one challenged my authority or ridiculed me. Instead, the hats opened a door, both inside me and with others.
Little did I know that donning a hat would have an impact on how I interacted with others. As I grew braver in my millinery displays, I showed up for my team differently. As we moved past the early days of the pandemic into an uncomfortable but steady’ish state, I focused less on making it look easy and more on talking openly about the challenges we were facing, professionally and personally. I grew more
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